


Last Seed, 4E191

by YourDarlingSon



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Canon Compliant, pre-transition trans character, prequel to Alchemist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 07:33:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19313554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YourDarlingSon/pseuds/YourDarlingSon
Summary: Lin, 12, has nightmares. She wants to find out what is inside that old house, and why it makes her dream, and daydream, about it. Good luck, you little idiot.Lin is pre-transition Leo, from Alchemist.





	Last Seed, 4E191

Anyone would be small beside the chapel, which was more than three times as tall as any of the multi-story houses in Cheydinhal, but Lin was especially so. Mosquitos buzzed and wind blew the scents of late summer down from the mountains as she sat on the dark chapel steps, her soft soled shoes scuffing the masonry.  Her dark hair, perpetually tangled and frizzy, was arranged in two plaits which she habitually tugged and smoothed as the sky darkened. If she was going to see inside the old house it would have to be soon - tonight or tomorrow night. After that, she would be gone. 

 

The other children in the city were all scared of the house, too. They said that a monster was inside, that the last family that lived there had been eaten one by one, and that their spirits still re-lived that final day, completely unaware of their passing. Others said that the house truly  _ was _ abandoned except for the basement, which was home to a cannibalistic witch who tricked naive children into eating human flesh. That’s what Vivi had told her and Lin had no reason to question it. But now Vivi was gone, and Lin was almost gone, and she wanted to know for sure. 

 

Nobody had lived there for as long as Lin could remember, despite its fine location across the street from the chapel of Arkay. The windows had boards nailed over their dirty glass, and the front door had been patched and boarded shut, as if to keep something inside. Its framing was sound enough, but the plaster was cracked and eroded, the roof missing tiles and growing moss. It had a stone fence once, like the other houses in the row, but that had long since fallen apart. All that remained were two lonely posts framing the front door, marking an overgrown, dead path nobody walked anymore, and a fallen gate eaten practically to nothing by rust. 

 

Lin’s hand curled tightly around a little bundle of flowers - arrowroot and lavender - and she stood up. The sleeping neighborhood was empty of guards and criminals alike, so there were none to witness her crossing the broad street except for the moons. Even the statue of Arkay in the plaza faced away. Masser and Secunda hung overhead like glass ornaments, shedding pale light that made her skin glow against her dark hair, the same bone white color of new plaster against the framing of the clean, well kept houses surrounding this tumbled ruin. 

 

She stood in front of the gateway for a moment, that space between the remaining fence posts, before turning to the left. Instead of walking through that threshold, she went across the place where the fence had once been. She felt in her heart, somehow, that to walk through that gateway was wrong. She didn’t want to do things wrong. Blades of grass whispered against her ankles as she approached the door, telling her where her feet could fall on hard ground between the overgrown tussocks, until she was able to look into the door’s dusty window. 

 

Her hand empty of flowers timidly felt the boards nailed crossways over the door. They were weathered from long exposure to the sun and rain, and felt somehow sad beneath her delicate hand. Pushing herself up on her tiptoes, she peered through warped glass into darkness and pushed magic through her palm, into the board. As she did, her eyes stared sightlessly, unfocused. All her attention was spent feeling the board, and how it was to be a board; it was so weary, worn to breaking by years of neglect. The nails holding it in place were rusted and coarse. They hurt like rotted teeth. She withdrew her hand and her magic with it, and in an act of mercy to the board pressed a fingertip to the heads of the nails. Each vibrated violently for a moment as she touched them, first on the board that had been part of her, and then on all the others. 

 

In their vibration, some wiggled out of the wood a few millimeters; these she worked a fingernail under and pulled out. They were slimmer now, ages of rust shaken loose; in her hand they felt like bird bones. She pulled out ten nails this way and set them on the ground beside the door, sheltered from sight by a bush and kept company by her bouquet. The lowest board was free, and she set it alongside the nails, being careful not to crush the bittersweets that grew from the house’s foundation. She admired those flowers, untroubled as they were by lack of sunlight. They were the same that grew naturally around the grave markers in the pauper’s yard.

 

She wiggled each board, and a few more came loose. She put them beside the other board and their nails beside the other nails. The remaining boards held tight when she moved them, protesting with squeaks as they clung to their purpose. One by one, she placed a hand on their surfaces and muffled them, her magic swallowing the creak of tired wood and old metal. 

 

Lin felt tired. She was stronger at magic than most children her age, but even so her blood felt cold and her knees wobbly as she tried the knob. It was locked.  _ Of course it would be locked _ , she thought. That was right. It made sense.

 

She had one more night to try again. Instead of entering the house exhausted, she picked her bundle of flowers up from the ground and crossed from the overgrown yard, across the chapel square to a fine, large house. It had a neat stone foundation, with white plaster between dark frames as all the other houses did. Its only distinction was a sign that hung by the door depicting a yellow bird with spread wings. The front door was locked. Lin had a key, but her bedroom window was open, and she liked it better than the door. Her room was the highest in a circular tower that faced out onto the square, so the statue of Arkay watched as she stuffed her flowers into a pocket and concentrated the final fumes of her magical energy. 

 

She crouched down for a moment, her skirts just kissing the dusty street before she jumped upward, toward her windowsill. She wasn’t light or strong enough to reach the third floor in one leap, but she’d lightened herself enough so that climbing the wooden framing to her window was easy. 

 

Her room was dark, but she navigated it with practiced ease. She knew by heart the location of everything in the room, so it was by touch that she kicked off her shoes and walked across the room to pluck a candlestick off the desk, which she lit with a finger. By the light of this candle, she poured water from a ewer, drinking some and using the rest in a basin to wash her hands and face. Lin was too tired to read, so she threw her dress and shoes into a corner and pulled the extra blankets off her bed and onto the floor.  

 

On any other night they would have joined a jumble of books and clothes there, but tonight the floor was empty. As she freed her hair from its braids, she looked around at the lifeless, empty  floor. It reminded her of Vivi’s room, and how they’d packed her memories away in boxes after she’d... been found. Now it was Lin whose memories were packed away in boxes, some to be shipped off with her to a school in the West Weald, and some to be hidden away in a dusty cellar beneath sacks of potatoes. 

 

That weight of inevitability pressed down on her shoulders as she combed wormwood oil into her hair. She didn’t want to leave, but she didn’t want to stay either. Not in the same house as her mama, who treated her like a stranger, and not in the same house as her papa, who said that he loved mama more than anything. The truth was that they didn’t want her to stay, and so she would have to go. She was lucky to have anywhere to go at all, and she knew it. Viovolia hadn’t gone anywhere except to the graveyard near the chapel, under those pretty purple flowers. In Lin’s heart was the fearful notion that mama might put her there, too, if she stayed as she was, and she didn’t know how to be anyone else. All she knew was that she was... wrong, somehow. 

 

Lin blew out the candle as she brushed. She wanted to look out her window at the statue in the square and watch the orange and green moonlight sparkling off the leaves of the willows. Her eyelids were drooping before she finished, but even so she caught a glimmer of movement across the plaza. She stared in the direction she’d seen it until it appeared again: a dim flicker of light behind the window in the old house. It only flickered for a moment, but she stared at the window for much longer. Even as she tucked herself under her single blanket, she still held the building in her mind’s eye, trying to imagine what could be hidden in that boarded window.

 

She knew there was someone or something in that house. She’d been convinced for years, since she started having the dreams. Over and over, vivid nightmares about mama and that house. They were always different: in some, her mother was coming to kill her at the request of her father, while in others she had already killed him, and was coming for Lin next. In dreams where she tried to fly away, the ground eventually pulled her down and she would be trapped. In dreams where she ran, her legs would become like lead weights dragging through mud, and she would be trapped. Every vision was a frantic race against death to reach the only safe place where she couldn’t be followed by anyone - the old house. Every vision was unique and horrible, making her awaken with dark hollows under her already dark eyes.  

 

Her eyes. Her funny looking eyes. She didn’t hate her eyes, even though they looked different from other people’s; instead, she hated other people’s eyes, and how they would linger on her when they thought she didn’t see them. When they saw her, she saw herself reflected in their vision: a skinny, pale, tangle-haired girl who never played with other kids. She saw a little nothing with a blank face like a doll, eyes old and unreadable as buttons, lips always chapped and bitten. That girl that other people saw cast a long shadow over her heart, so long it had reached out over her parent’s hearts, and her tutor’s hearts, and  everyone’s heart except Vivi’s. 

 

+++

 

A day passed, occupied by mundane necessities that made Lin want to crawl out of her skin like a crab in a too-small shell. Her mother had already corresponded with master Drath about Lin, but he required  _ she _ describe for him the details of her nightmares, as well as every major injury and illness she could remember having. She knew that her mother and father had already provided their accounts of Lin’s problems in writing, including her moods, bedwetting, and ‘delusions’; still, she scratched answers to Drath’s probing questions in an increasingly messy scrawl, until her blood was hot with shame. Finally, Lin set down the pen, pushing her chair back with a squeak. Before her mother could grab her sleeve and force her to spend the rest of the day filling travel-chests with half-full journals and underclothes, Lin ran down the stairs and out the front door. 

 

Tension lingered in her even after she got outside, feeling like waves of prickling needles that made her shiver and jump at every sound. She wished she could use magic to alleviate the tension, but she needed to be sure she would have enough that night, so instead of shooting birds out of trees with arcs of lightning she ran around the town to no place in particular. Her circuit took her through main streets and alleys, to every building that was of any importance to her, and away again. She barely saw the primly dressed men and ladies who turned their heads as she passed. Her eyes cut through them without resistance, seeing only neat masonry, banners, and waterway reeds as her soft shoes padded down cobblestone streets or made hollow thumps on the boards of low bridges. 

 

Finally exhausted, and with sweat running into her eyes, she pushed through the heavy door of the chapel of Arkay to drink from the barrel of water which the priests kept for the pilgrims who would occasionally come to pray at the nine altars. The air in the temple was much cooler than the muggy outdoors, and the warm glow of candlelight in the dark felt comforting in an abstractly nostalgic way. With measured speed she walked to the barrel and leaned over it, washing her face in the water before taking the dipper off its hook and drinking deeply. The priestess, an ancient imperial woman, looked over her shoulder from where she sat in the pews. Lin locked eyes with her for a moment before the woman returned to her prayers, at which point Lin re-hooked the dipper and pushed out the west side door into the evening. 

 

Through the eyes of that priestess she knew she looked like a mess. Her hair was wild from running and wet from sweating and washing her face, but the cool water in her hair, now running down her chin and into her clothes, helped cut through the last mind dulling heat of the day. The dry warmth of fire and the chill of ice bothered her less than it would an imperial, but the humid days of high summer made her feel as though her mind was being pulled into a pit of tar. Now, with the sun dipping behind the trees and water pulling the heat of emotion from her face and neck, Lin felt nearly able to confront the finality of her departure. 

 

Not yet, though, so as she padded down the steps she kept her eyes on her feet, careful not to look at the old house across the street. She had the impression that if she did, it would leap from its seat and swallow her whole, like a toad eating a mouse. The vision she had from the house was like she had from the eyes of the townspeople, but somehow completely different. The weight of awareness was there, but instead of scrutiny she felt anticipation.  _ Come inside, _ it said. She only had to weather it for a moment though, for she quickly passed around the corner and through an iron gate into the poorly kept chapel graveyard where the house could not see her. 

 

Though the day’s light was fading, she picked her way between overgrown bushes and over tumbled gravestones with easy confidence until she reached a newer marker toward the back. The name engraved on it was crisp, and the flowers around it were trimmed back and tended far more than in the rest of the cemetery. 

 

Viovolia and her mother slept here in the back of the pauper’s yard, where they had been buried by the new baron. Lin knew from her mother that the placement of a baroness here instead of in the family’s crypt was an insult, and it made her heart ache as she laid down on her friend’s grassy blanket. The blades tickled her face and her nose filled with the scents of soil and the flowers that grew in profusion. Generations of townspeople had planted honeysuckles and lilacs, whose enchanting scents mingled with pendant amaranths and asphodel among the stones in all seasons but winter. The flowers on the lilacs had long since turned brown and fallen off, but the honeysuckles still drizzled sweetness into the gentle breeze that made the bellflowers and bittersweets dance and bob beneath them.  

 

Lin lay there with her head pressed into the feeble grass that survived in the shadows of the chapel and cemetery, and after a moment of stillness, began to shake. Her brain swirled with grief and fear; leaving this town would mean leaving Vivi, but Vivi had already left. She’d been gone for four and a half years, taken away by the same brutality that had taken her mother. Lin’s thin white hands, cold as bird’s feet, tangled in the grass and held fast to it as she was wracked with sobs. Her face twisted into a grotesque mask of pain, turning red and running with hot tears and snot as she pressed herself into the soil. She felt as if she might fall into the sky if she lost hold for even a moment. She fell, instead, into memories that felt as real as if they’d been made yesterday: soft hands, the smell of honey in milk tea, the red stain on floorboards that had since been torn up. She embraced wave after wave of grief until her head was empty, all longing and pain washed out with her tears. Vivi wasn’t here anymore, nor was she anywhere, Lin decided,  _ so no matter where I go, I won’t be leaving her behind _ .

 

When Lin finally left the cemetery, it was with a handful of purple bittersweets, blue bellflowers, and yellow primroses. She wanted to have Vivi with her when she finally found out what was inside, and she might not have time to properly tell her in the morning. It was right, Lin decided, that they do this together, the same way they’d done everything together. Back then.  

 

That was how she, flowers in hand, came to be at the door of the abandoned house. It was still unboarded, its nakedness hidden by overgrown bushes and the way people’s eyes gloss over ugly things. The chill of despair was gone from her blood, washed out by tears and replaced with the electric frenzy of fleeting courage. She knew that  _ thought _ would make a coward of her, so she cleared her mind, grasped the doorknob, and pushed herself into the lock. She felt tumblers inside sleepily resisting as she clicked them open one by one, and as she withdrew herself, she turned the knob and slipped through the creaking door. 

 

The inside of the house was dark as a grave. The street outside had been dark, but had glowed dimly with flickering torches that priests kept lit around the chapel; in here, though, there was no light. There was not even a glow from outside of the boarded windows. Sightlessly her eyes gaped into the void, round as saucers as she internally cursed herself for not silencing the door’s hinges. When her eyes failed to adjust to the darkness, she closed them instead, screwing her face up as she pulled a well of energy into her eyeballs. 

 

This night eye spell was one she had practiced often, reading books in the dark long after she was supposed to be sleeping. She opened her eyes to a room cast in shades of ghostly blue. Dusty cobwebs adorned every corner and more, stretching from the tops of crumbling old barrels to the ceiling. They hung thick and sheer as silk chiffon, making her shiver with revulsion. The floor was square tile, and just in front of where she stood there lay a faded rug. She stepped into the space, wiping her shoes on the mat as she cast her eyes around the barren room; to the right was another door flanked by more barrels, and to the left a stone staircase which led to a higher story whose wooden floorboards were this room’s ceiling. 

 

Carefully avoiding the cobwebs, she crept up the stairs into a room with a great stone fireplace. It was cold, surrounded by broken boxes and empty bookshelves. The floorboards protested quietly as she moved into the room, her steps muffled by thick dust. She could see now that the dust had been disturbed in a path that led from the top of the stone stairs to the bottom of a second flight of wooden stairs in the opposite direction. She stepped off the path and walked away from the fireplace, past the foot of the wooden stairs to explore the rest of the room. 

 

Where her house had walls between rooms, this house was so open that no doors or walls stood between the dead fireplace and the furthest nook away from it, furnished with a plain table and rickety chair. The walls were cracked and bare, and the floor was blanketed in dust and shattered remains of crates and boxes. The house was empty and dead, but details, like how the table was pulled away from the wall at an angle and how the wooden crates were busted to pieces, made her feel violence flowing through the desolation. 

 

Lin returned to the dust path and climbed the wooden stairs to a loft, finding more of the same dust, cobwebs, and crumbling plaster walls. There was another rug, and a broom leaning against a nearly empty bookshelf; rolls of paper and sticks of charcoal sat on the shelves, the latter arranged neatly by size, their smallest barely larger than the last joint of her little finger. They were kept company by a candlestick whose candle was burned down to a stump, and an ink well, and a quill.  The papers, to her disappointment, were empty except for a few sooty fingerprints. She found nothing more, so Lin turned and descended the stairs until she stood in the entry hall again. The last door was this one, which had been to her right as she entered. Taking a deep breath, she reached for the knob. 

 

She twisted it to find it unlocked, then released the knob and pressed her fingers to the hinges of the door, quieting them even as her skin crawled from proximity to the cobwebs. Now confident in the door’s silence, she slipped through and shut it behind her. 

 

She emerged into a tiny chamber with lime washed stone walls and a low ceiling thickly draped in dusty webs. The floor here was stone, but unlike the even square tiles of the entry hall these were irregular and had cracks filled in by gritty mortar and dirt. From the small antechamber, she followed a stone staircase, which descended through a narrow hall and into a basement that smelled of dampness. The floor of the chamber was packed dirt, and the walls, once painted, had flaked to leave raw stone exposed. 

 

There, cobwebs framed a sight which made cold fear creep up her spine: the wall opposite the stairs had been opened, but not by a doorway. Instead, stone blocks as large as her head had been pulled from the wall and left scattered around a hole nearly seven feet tall. Her breath caught in her throat, as if it were trying to run back up the steps without her, but instead of following it she took another deep breath of musty air and held her flowers tightly. If she ran, she would never have another chance. 

 

She would not run. 

 

So, she walked. Carefully, she picked her way over the bricks and through the ragged hole into a round passage formed entirely of soil and rock. It twisted and turned, sloping steadily downward, rounded walls forming a vault overhead. Tree roots cut through the tunnel walls, so she walked carefully, watching her feet. As she descended, she began to feel something impossibly bizarre: a buzzing in her bones, like the sound of a thousand bumblebees. It pulsed in a strange rhythm, somehow familiar. She couldn’t find its source, so she continued down the tunnel until it stopped descending. There, she looked up from her feet to find the end of the tunnel, and a door wreathed in blinding light. She was so startled by the sight of it that she took a step backward and fell tumbling over a root, flowers scattering from her hand as the back of her head hit the floor with a smack.

 

Lin gasped in pain and curled in on herself, her eyes closed tight as she reached for the back of her head. She flinched at feeling wetness under her hair, and when she looked at her hand it was if she had plunged her whole arm into a barrel of blood. She would have screamed if she were well practiced in screaming. Instead, as she was well practiced in silence, she froze, taking in the blood red of her skin, with shiny black on her fingertips. Her night eye had broken when she fell. She had hit her head, and it hurt, but she’d felt worse and been fine. She took a breath, and another, before looking back up to the door: the light around it was no longer a blinding white-violet. Now, the archway of black stone glowed a deep red that made everything around it seem sculpted from gore. Set into that black arch was a great obsidian door with strange reliefs carved into its face: a gigantic skull looked downward upon five people, one towering over the others. Just above the skull’s eyes was a circle, and inscribed in the circle a bright red handprint whose glow pulsed in time with the buzzing. 

 

Lin swallowed, her mouth suddenly feeling very dry. She groped around on the ground for her flowers until she had almost all of them, and, clutching them in her hands, peered at the door. The details were hard to make out in the bizarrely shifting light, so she stepped closer, until she was nearly touching it. The vibration, thumping like a heartbeat below the range of hearing, made her muscles twitch and jump as she leaned in. The larger figure on the door was a thin woman with long hair. Facing her, the four small figures might have been children.  _ Yes, they are children. _ In one hand she held a fifth child; in the other hand she held a knife. 

 

The woman’s dress and hair were carved in rippling scores, like the lines of a thumbprint, and without thinking Lin ran her bloody fingertips over the ridges. She wanted to feel them, but when she touched the stone, a powerful, hissing voice inside her head began to speak. She didn’t hear what it said, because the moment it began she bolted back up the tunnel, blindly scrambling hand over foot, trying to conjure night eyes. Her spell was weak and blurry, but she couldn’t stop to focus. She sprinted back through the basement and up the stairs to the door, its hinges shrieking as she wrenched it open. She slammed it behind her, panting as she stumbled backward into a cobweb-shrouded corner. 

 

For minutes she stood unable to move, shaking, and staring at the plain wooden door between her and the cellar.  _ What was that? _ She’d read countless books, fiction and nonfiction, and she was sure that some of them must have been about daedra and evil magic, but for some reason she couldn’t remember a word. She felt as if she were underwater, trying to surface without knowing which way was up. The weak blue of the room faded to blackness. Her eyes saw nothing. Instead, inside her brain, she saw broken bits and pieces of stories, and dark, bloody light. She was submerged in memory, ignorant of the time passing her by until a sound snapped her back into the present. The door creaked open. 

 

She pulled in a quick lungful of air and shuddered at the smell. It was like an open crypt, the heavy sweet scent of rot mingling with sweat, and incense, and perfume. Lin’s skin crawled feeling the air, as if whatever had opened the door had filled the room completely. She imagined tendrils of vapor brushing over her, the still air of the house brought to maddening, terrible life. She could only wait.

 

She concentrated, and her vision returned after what felt like an eternity. The room emerged from the darkness, objects taking vague shape before their closer details could crystallize. At the far end of the room, a blurred human form was slowly moving up the stairs. She was afraid to even look at it, as if doing so would make it… real.

 

She took a moment to think: if she muffled the door she would be able to slip out, and maybe it wouldn’t hear her. In the stories, ghosts didn’t react to living people at all, sometimes, but… did ghosts have a smell?  _ Ectoplasm doesn’t smell like that. _ The shape was halfway up the stairs, so she looked down and carefully stepped over the splintered boards that had gathered in the corner. It was near the top of the stairs when she reached the front door, turned to put her hands on the hinges, and muffled them. When she turned back, it was on the second step from the bottom, head turning toward her. 

 

It moved as quietly as a ghost should, though now that she looked directly, she could see a blurry human man. Hair hung in a dark curtain around his face, framing wide eyes and an open-mouthed smile. He wore only loose pants and a dagger belt, so even out of focus, Lin could see that he was thin.  _ Too thin _ .  Lin and he were both still as stone for a few moments, until he whispered. 

 

“Who’s there?”  It was quiet, sung out in three notes, but in the silence she was deafened nearly beyond understanding.  His pose, arms held wide and unnaturally, reminded her of a young woman posing for a painter, and his hands were discolored, flexed pale wrists fading into greyed and blacked fingers. His eyes were wide open, searching the dark. “Has my brother come home at last? Please say yes,” His voice was rough, but unexpectedly feminine in register.  _ Brother. _

 

Lin shook like a leaf. Sweat trickled down her back as she tried not to breath. She hardly dared blink. If he could see her, he would have seen her. He didn’t, so he couldn’t. He couldn’t. 

 

“Or say no. It’s rude to… say nothing.” When he paused, his feminine affectations dropped away, and his smile wilted. His posture, which had been like a dancer’s, dropped seamlessly into another, and before Lin knew what was happening he had a dagger in his hand. He moved faster than she could make sense of, and before she could untangle her mind his hand flicked out. Lin jumped in her skin as she heard a loud THUNK in the wood beside her head, and her vision, until then fuzzy from exhaustion, snapped into crystalline clarity. Her eyes followed the direction of the hand and saw a long dagger, glinting like black glass, stuck into the wood beside her. It had impaled her braid. If she were taller, it would have stuck in her chest. Her eyes snapped back up to the man, now on the first step, and her chest fluttered with tiny breaths, as quiet as she could make them.  He was smiling again, thin-lipped, as if nothing had happened. His eyes were wide and staring, ringed with smudged makeup and sunken by exhaustion. 

 

He spoke, again cheerful. “Oh, bother, I dropped my knife!”  The laughter that followed was brief and high-pitched, stopping abruptly, “Clumsy, clumsy, clumsy!” His smile was full of teeth as he left the steps. Lin tried to pull away from the dagger, but the blade was sunk deep in the wood and even if she pulled hard, the cutting edge was oriented downward. Blood turning to ice, she watched the man drift, almost puppet-like, across the square tiles. His movements were like sleepwalking set to a waltzing rhythm. She could hear it as she watched him, his limbs rising and falling on strings, like a marionette. As he came closer, she got a better look at his arms; they were tightly muscled, covered from wrist to shoulder in hundreds of little cuts and scars. 

 

Three feet away, then two, then one. He reached out a hand, sweeping discolored fingertips through the darkness. She drew breath as he grew near, pressing her head against the wood behind her. It hurt, but even so she pushed herself back as hard as she could. She could smell chemical preservatives and stale fear under his stink. His fingertips swept closer and closer, until they grazed the pommel of the dagger. “There you are.”

 

With surprising fluidity, he wrapped his hand around the dagger’s hilt and yanked it free. He took a deep breath and sighed, his expression fading from humor into disappointment, and then into puzzlement. “Flowers?” 

 

Lin remembered the small bundle of flowers in her hand, squeezing subconsciously before she realized they were no longer there. When the dagger pinned her hair she’d dropped them onto her feet. She didn’t dare look down. She could only look forward, at his dark fingers playing idly along the knife’s edge as he stared over her head at nothing. His eyes moved like the eyes of someone dreaming. 

 

“I will get mother some flowers.” He turned around, tucking the dagger into its sheath. His back, Lin could now see, was covered in scars. Sets of long parallel gouges crossed and criss-crossed each other from his neck to the top of his pants. There was no fat on him to disguise how the scars resisted the pull of skin over muscle. Dancing steps carried him to the base of the stairs and up, until Lin heard him moving to the second flight, and saw dust falling like snow from the cracks in the wooden ceiling. She nervously muffled the door again, and slipped out into the night. 

 

Lin walked carefully, legs shaking, until she passed the threshold in the old stone fence. She looked down at her feet as she stepped over the rusted gate, but couldn’t see them. Her world, still in shades of ghostly blue, blurred until only vague shapes were visible; she didn’t see as her toe caught on the metal gate and she dropped to her hands and knees. Her eyes, she realized, were watering, and as much as she wanted to run, every muscle in her body felt boiled and wrung out like an old cloth bandage. Her breath, held too frequently and for too long, was now escaping her in choking, noiseless sobs that became wet coughs, tasting of copper.  She’d used too much magic. She rose slowly to her feet and moved as quickly as she could across the plaza. Her head pounded and her vision blurred as she focused on the uneven cobbles ahead of her. Her eyes felt about to burst. She nearly stumbled a few times when her racing heart tried to push her faster than her legs could go, but finally she fell against her home’s front door. 

 

After a moment fishing in the neck of her dress, she found the key on her necklace, leaned down to turn the key with shaking hands, and went inside. The house was dark and her sight was beginning to fade, but she knew the space well enough to feel her way to the stairs and up. Her muscles felt on the brink of giving out, and she had to stop a moment on each step, willing herself to continue. Her legs felt like twigs in a strong wind, their movements just hardly under her control as she left the final step and set out across the parlor. She breathed more evenly now, sniffling to clear her nose of tears and clotting blood, and her footfalls, usually sure and delicate, were now uneven and clumsy. It was impossible to move without pain as she approached her parents’ bedroom door. She reached it, and paused for a moment, then knocked. The knock was not answered, so she opened the door, poking her head into another darkness. This darkness smelled of clean linens and nothing else. Lin leaned into the clean space and whispered.

 

“Mama? Are you awake?” Her voice was reed-thin, wavering in the dark, and each word sent a coursing pain through her eyes. A deep grunt accompanied a shifting of covers. It was her father rolling over, and going back to sleep. There was another shuffling, the sound of shifted pillows, and a woman’s voice finally answered. It was croaky and tired. 

 

“It’s the middle of the night.” 

 

Lin paused in the doorway. 

 

“I used my magic too much; I’m… hurts to talk.” Lin thought about the black door, and the man, and put one hand to the back of her head. The lump there felt like a paper cut compared to the sucking ache inside her brain.

 

“There’s a tonic in the cabinet. Blue label, red ribbon. Sleep will help.”

 

She knew the one. Lin’s heart felt deflated. She’d hoped this time might be different. 

 

“Drink some water, too.” 

 

“Thanks, mum.”  Lin heard a grunt, and the sounds of her mother re-burying herself in a duvet. She stepped back with a wince, and shut the door.


End file.
